I've been casually job hunting for a couple months since rounds of layoffs started at my company.
I've applied to umpteen places and haven't had a single callback. In my twenty+ years working as a dev, this is the worst I've seen it since about 2005.
khernandezrt · 12m ago
I’m in the same boat. I’ve been employed since 2019, got laid off 3 weeks ago. I’ve applied to over 70 jobs and not a single has replied other than to reject me. This is brutal.
tennisflyi · 7m ago
Good luck. Reddit job hunting(?) sub has it pegged at ~400 applications, IIRC
chao- · 45m ago
It is difficult to balance the competing priorities of "home ownership is widely affordable" and "home prices must always go up".
When the balance is not broadly possible, our system seems to favor "home prices must always go up", at least in the short term.
Dig1t · 33m ago
There are many places in the US where you can buy a house for less than 50k.
If you want prices to drop in popular areas then we have to make it easy for people to actually build houses and increase supply in popular areas. Of course giving homeowners a say about whether housing is allowed to be built near them, of course they are going to vote against it because they have an incentive to keep prices high.
chao- · 22m ago
I agree with all of that, but I think there is additional nuance. I would love if the path were as simple as:
(1) Make housing easier to build.
(2) Receive sufficient housing supply.
Even if you make it easier to build houses, there is a market for the capital that housing developers access. Currently, that market also assumes that prices will go up (or at least not go down). Thus, once we go far enough past the point where existing prices are higher than the return on new housing, even all of our dream reforms may not lead to a flood of new housing starts.
I want to be clear: loosing zoning, reforming regulations, and so forth, are all still worth doing. It is better than nothing. But if the result is a shock of supply, the financing for new homes from the biggest players will dry up. That doesn't make a solution impossible, but it does complicate it.
itake · 6m ago
Do the homes selling for less than 50k have a job market to supports owning a home at that price?
mingus88 · 23m ago
I think it’s natural for homeowners to be resistant to new builds in the same way office workers hated the move to cubicles.
I was in the Midwest recently and it was wild to see a block of high density houses in the middle of farmland. Houses that look exactly the same, shoved onto tiny lots with little gap between them, and surrounded by miles of corn.
These are obviously attractive to developers as they are maximized profit vehicles, but the downsides to everyone else are enormous.
In my opinion, we need to build housing above stores, so communities can actually work. Build a town, not a subdivision. What’s the point of a $50k home if you have to spend two hours a day driving to make it work?
gottorf · 7m ago
> Build a town, not a subdivision.
I would really love to see a billionaire tackle this. There's loads of empty, or nearly empty, space in this country. Heck, take over a town if you really want! Sink a few million dollars into kickstarting small-scale urbanism.
I'm not usually much of a billionaire-hater, but today's lot for the most part seems to be uninspired, when it comes to projects like this.
petra303 · 1h ago
Why get out of a 3-4% loan just to get into a 7-8% loan?
Esophagus4 · 1h ago
I think if you believed 7-8% loans were normal, you might be more likely to bite the bullet and make your move.
But if you believe 3-4% is normal, then you’re probably waiting for rates to return to “normal.”
I think it’s a side effect of years of low interest rates… people are conditioned now to believe low is normal, and they want to hang on until we get back to that.
I was hoping rates would stay “high” for a while which I thought would soften the housing market so I could buy, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. Instead of prices dropping, inventory just dried up.
Shows how silly I am for thinking I could time the market.
hibikir · 39m ago
It's the other way around. If you think 3% is normal, you buy now and refinance while people think that the house is unaffordable. Remember that lower interest rates make home prices go even higher!
If you think it will stay at 7%, that 3% loan you already have is a treasure to keep using for a decade or two.
delfinom · 20m ago
Yep, it's insane that people think 3% loans will magically fix the housing market. It's beyond delusional that they refuse to accept it accelerate home price increases and bidding wars.
toomuchtodo · 1h ago
Real estate market will soften as the economy comes off the rails [1]. 6-12 months from now should have more motivated sellers depending on market (foreclosures in Clark County Las Vegas market are up 32% year over year June 2025, for example [2]). Short sales and foreclosure auctions are also options. If you still want to buy down the road, be in the strongest financial position possible to get financing and make an offer when the market conditions turn more buyer favorable. Seller concessions can be used to buy down the mortgage rate, if that’s useful information.
Put in other words, in any market, there are bids and there are offers. Prices don't move until one side gets in a rush. A seller's market (like in 2021) is one where buyers are in a rush and will lift the offer. A buyer's market (like during GFC) is one where sellers are in a rush and will hit the bid.
The pressure on buyers, at least in the past couple of decades, is that the increase in the supply of housing has not been at all commensurate with the increase in population. That, combined with a great increase in the money supply, makes for tremendous upward pressure on real estate prices.
Sellers generally aren't in a rush except in times of economic crises, especially paired with a period of overleveraging running up to it; i.e. the GFC. Economic softening appears to be in the works at the moment, so buyers should get a little reprieve soon, but since there isn't the same overleveraged buyers all rushing for the exits like in 2008, a similar crash is unlikely.
willis936 · 54m ago
The housing market won't soften until we build a shit ton of houses which will never happen until there are a lot of very angry people willing it into existence.
toomuchtodo · 32m ago
I don’t think we’re ever going to build houses again at the rate we did before the 2008 GFC. A substantial portion of people who work in construction are undocumented (and will be targeted for deportation by this admin for the remains of their term), zoning remains a challenge, cost of materials continues to inflate. How many years would it take to get back up to speed? 5? 10? What does the economy look like then? Will enough young folks go into the necessary trades to meet the demand for this labor? We might keep building along at the anemic pace of today, but I argue we’ll never build again at the rate we did pre GFC.
So, while interest rates are at historical 'norms', affordability is not.
daedrdev · 34m ago
It's basically illegal to build dense homes in most cities. And despite what people say, the vacancy rate is at historic lows so its not just "people are keeping them empty"
Its a disgrace that people deny the supply crunch we are in
Hammershaft · 1m ago
Housing as an investment creates all kinds of terribly misaligned political incentives for local democracies. A land value tax would've helped by shifting people's nest egg from the value of their homes to their accumulated savings from income.
As it is, NIMBYism is likely the biggest driver of rising costs of living, rising homelessness, rising municipal debt, and generational class divides.
yolovoe · 49m ago
Just a single data point against this. I got interviews with 4 companies out of 30 or so I applied to. Cleared all the onsites. Think FAANG, famous hedge fund, popular data analytics platform, and defense. 4 different industries. Job market's not the best, but it's also not that bad if you have 5 YOE+. Offers were good, ~$50-100K over my current pay.
So many people are using AI during the interviews to cheat, as long as you don't use AI and are good at leetcode, probably not that hard to snag an offer. I also interview people at a FAANG, and #1 reason to reject people these days is AI use. If you don't use AI and can leetcode and system design, you're pretty solid and will stand out from other half-baked candidates.
winter_blue · 44m ago
Was this very recent? The job markets for software engineers has been horrid, at least from mid 2022 to mid 2025. Maybe it’s changed now?
Anecdotally, I know a few engineers with 10+ YOE in NYC, Seattle, and California, all with actual FAANG or FAANG adjacent work experience, who couldn’t find jobs. One of whom even took a minimum wage job, and another who nearly did the same as well.
Maybe the tax code change is kicking off an industry revival?
itake · 4m ago
My friend that left cruise got a 2.3x pay bump (post-ipo) moving to Figma in Feb 2025. He also had interviews at Meta and other FANGA (where he used to work).
If tier3 companies are paying $540k-$1.5m for staff in 2025, then I assume the market is turned around.
rr808 · 24m ago
I'm finding it really hard to detect who is using AI and who isn't for leetcode questions. I'm not even sure its a big deal because as soon as they start they get all the AI tools anyway. I try to talk more about their work experience now.
ipnon · 18m ago
Let me guess, you went to an elite university and you worked in Big Tech?
nlawalker · 43m ago
> interview […] AI use
Can you elaborate? People don’t do well in the interview and say they could do it if they had AI with them? Or…?
Edit: Sorry, I missed “using AI during the interviews to cheat”.
tiltowait · 28m ago
Not the OP, but I interviewed a candidate for a remote position. He was kind of halting in his responses, until he suddenly wasn't. Borderline erudite, and I recognized some LLM speech patterns. I told my manager I thought he was using an LLM, but we hired him anyway.
After a few months on the job, he hadn't done any meaningful work. His responses to support tickets were clearly written by an LLM and offered only the most generic (and therefore unhelpful) support. He was eventually let go, and deservedly so.
toomuchtodo · 2h ago
There aren’t enough homes or jobs. What do?
FiatLuxDave · 42m ago
As far as I can tell, the problem isn't so much a lack of jobs or a lack of homes but rather that they aren't in the same place. In small town America, the problem isn't a lack of housing stock, it's that it is hard to afford it with few good paying jobs. In big city America, the problem isn't lack of jobs, it's that it is hard to find a job which pays enough for you to afford the limited housing stock.
I think this is a large reason behind the polarization in America today. We aren't all facing the same aspect of this imbalance.
I was hoping that the work-from-home movement was going to help with this, but RTO seems to be in full swing. So, I think our best bet would be to stop incentivizing the concentration of job creation. Absent a fix, we will have to wait a few decades for the imbalance to even out.
gottorf · 2m ago
> In big city America, the problem isn't lack of jobs, it's that it is hard to find a job which pays enough for you to afford the limited housing stock.
Maybe the more fundamental problem is that in big city America, it's easy for existing homeowners to band together to forbid any further housing stock from being built.
See Silicon Valley: amazing concentration of high-paying jobs, laughably low population density.
BobbyTables2 · 31m ago
Always hated how every startup sets up office in downtown San Francisco or similarly absurd cost of living area…
Could pay people well but half as much and have nice office in Colorado mountains, Vermont, or somewhere else beautiful…
Of course, startups rarely seem interested in saving money…
alpha_squared · 9m ago
It's a little unfair to blame startups, they largely just set up shop where the capital is. Most VCs required startups to be headquartered near by for easier management/communication. The tech scene in SV had such exceptionalism that it quite literally viewed any startup not in SV as an inevitable failure. Even YC mandated startups be in SV.
Zambyte · 1h ago
Make it legal to build homes
JackMorgan · 1h ago
We're heading further into a reality where there just aren't enough jobs. All the money has been hoovered into the stock market. There's just not enough floating around to pay people, it's all going into LLM electricity or graphics cards.
We should be living in a time of ease, where the whole planet is sustained with all of us only working a few hours a week. Instead most people are fighting for scraps barely able to afford rent.
It won't continue like this forever. The line doesn't always go up.
simpaticoder · 1h ago
Wouldn't it be nice if individuals decided at the start of their career how much money was "enough" for them, and made a pledge to retire once they hit that number. Then society can give them an "I won!" hat or gold card or something, and the next guy can take the role. In this way all enterprises become an engine pulling new hires off the street, and emitting independently wealthy people to go and enjoy their lives.
But instead we have a tiny minority of people who control more and more capital. This has well-known and terrible consequences for society from almost every angle. What I don't understand is why the .1% don't want to step aside and let someone else have a turn. It's funny that our bodies have stomachs, so we know when we've eaten "enough". But money doesn't get stored in the body.
sidewndr46 · 52m ago
You'd have to have some guarantee that the government would never alter the amount of inflation they create for that to be reasonable
charlie0 · 43m ago
No one can guarantee that but if you place your dollars into assets, those assets will inflate.
Uvix · 32m ago
Except when they don't, like Japan's stock market from 1989-2024.
toomuchtodo · 37m ago
The drive to become that wealthy and powerful does not turn off. It’s a similar failure mode as a meth addict stripping a substation for copper. Neither persona can help themselves.
> It's funny that our bodies have stomachs, so we know when we've eaten "enough".
Humorously on topic, GLP-1s patch the reward center in your brain and say “enough is enough.” If only there was a similar protocol for wealth and power.
abbycurtis33 · 1h ago
Money doesn't sit in the stock market. Value, sure, but the money goes right back into the economy.
dismalaf · 50m ago
Money only goes to the company to get reinvested when the company sells shares, so at IPO time, when an insider sells, when more shares are issued, etc...
Otherwise, it's one asset holder selling to another asset holder, usually at ever increasing prices. So yes, a lot of money is simply sitting in the stock market.
Now, some does come back in the form of share buybacks and dividends. That being said, the average dividend yield is significantly less than the long-run average (it's less than 2 percent right now).
graeme · 56m ago
If you buy a stock from a new share sale, that goes to the company as capital. The company then spends the money.
The unenployment rate is quite low. There are complaints you can make about the economy but the model of money you laid out is completely wrong.
Avicebron · 1h ago
Tentative book title: The Line Stops.
chao- · 52m ago
EDIT: I wrote this in a rush intending to refer to general market entry. In a broad sense, what I ended up writing is incorrect. To preserve the accuracy of the comment history I will not remove my mistake.
>All the money has been hoovered into the stock market.
I think you might misunderstand what the stock market is. Or perhaps you misunderstand what what stocks are? When you purchase stock, it doesn't get locked in a vault, with your name written next to it, and the number of shares it got you on that day. That money goes to the company, and they use that to finance their operations (and ideally, further growth). That financing may go directly to salaries, or even if it goes to services, those services are paid to someone who pays salaries.
If your claim is instead that "all" of that money, or some meaningful majority of that money, is going to electricity and AI silicon, I would invite you to do some basic math on the companies involved.
sszz · 39m ago
This is not how stocks work at all outside of stock offerings…
chao- · 33m ago
Yes, I was intending to discuss stock offerings. They are just another form of financing. One of many.
I incorrectly explained what I meant, and broadly speaking, what I wrote is incorrect.
However, I stand by my statement that "all" of the money is not going to electricity or AI silicon.
keernan · 43m ago
>>That money goes to the company
When you purchase stock, your money goes to the seller of that stock. That's what makes a "market". The stock market isn't a bunch of companies selling their stock to the public.
la64710 · 1h ago
Homes are unaffordable to most. Even if you sell your house for a million dollar where will
You move to?
As far jobs are concerned the job market is completely fucked up. Their is oversupply and there are no wage increase.
It does not take a genius to understand why there is no mobility.
DANmode · 1h ago
Because you've all treated housing as a financial instrument,
instead of what it should be: safety for your family.
bobthepanda · 1h ago
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, and in a world where every home is priced this way it’s not like you could go to an alternative housing market.
charlie0 · 41m ago
Of course you can, digital nomads have been geoarbitraging for a long time.
No comments yet
jmclnx · 1h ago
I look at it as an expense. If you can sell and make a few bucks, great. But I doubt any new buyers will make out.
I expect in the not to distant future, the only way someone will get to own a house is to inherent one.
gottorf · 42m ago
> I expect in the not to distant future, the only way someone will get to own a house is to inherent one.
Only if the current insanity around zoning and regulation persists. In many real estate markets, it's literally illegal to increase the supply of housing; in others, price controls make it unappealing to invest in increasing the supply of housing.
I don't know what kind of toxicity is unique to the Anglophone world that exacerbates this problem, but at some point we just need to rip off the band-aid, tell existing homeowners to cry more, and just build, build, build. There's no inherent reason why the price of houses should so far exceed income in this vast country.
800xl · 1h ago
The job market is scary. I can afford a better house right now but am scared shitless I won’t be able to keep my income up. So we stay in our small old house for now, maybe forever.
Esophagus4 · 1h ago
Yes - looking around at the volume of people on the job market after years of layoffs, it is a very humbling experience thinking that if I do end up unemployed, I will have a hard time orchestrating my personal soft landing.
clipsy · 1h ago
> Even if you sell your house for a million dollar where will You move to?
Literally anywhere in the "bottom" 99% of the country by real estate costs?
eigen · 53m ago
median home price was 410k in 2025Q2 [1] so it may take most/all the net gains to purchase a median house.
Complaining because you can "only" afford to buy a median house without needing a mortgage has to be one of the more shockingly out of touch things I've heard on this very out of touch site.
Nobody is switching jobs because if you move you likely have to switch two jobs rather than just one.
Improving mobility means that you have to make a single earner household a viable pathway again. That means bring house prices down and subsidizing childcare.
Which would cost a bunch of billionaires a couple of pennies. So it will never happen.
rr808 · 26m ago
I'm surprised you were downvoted because it is a huge difference with previous generation. Its also a reason people move to big cities because its easy to get a variety of jobs for each partner.
I've applied to umpteen places and haven't had a single callback. In my twenty+ years working as a dev, this is the worst I've seen it since about 2005.
When the balance is not broadly possible, our system seems to favor "home prices must always go up", at least in the short term.
If you want prices to drop in popular areas then we have to make it easy for people to actually build houses and increase supply in popular areas. Of course giving homeowners a say about whether housing is allowed to be built near them, of course they are going to vote against it because they have an incentive to keep prices high.
(1) Make housing easier to build.
(2) Receive sufficient housing supply.
Even if you make it easier to build houses, there is a market for the capital that housing developers access. Currently, that market also assumes that prices will go up (or at least not go down). Thus, once we go far enough past the point where existing prices are higher than the return on new housing, even all of our dream reforms may not lead to a flood of new housing starts.
I want to be clear: loosing zoning, reforming regulations, and so forth, are all still worth doing. It is better than nothing. But if the result is a shock of supply, the financing for new homes from the biggest players will dry up. That doesn't make a solution impossible, but it does complicate it.
I was in the Midwest recently and it was wild to see a block of high density houses in the middle of farmland. Houses that look exactly the same, shoved onto tiny lots with little gap between them, and surrounded by miles of corn.
These are obviously attractive to developers as they are maximized profit vehicles, but the downsides to everyone else are enormous.
In my opinion, we need to build housing above stores, so communities can actually work. Build a town, not a subdivision. What’s the point of a $50k home if you have to spend two hours a day driving to make it work?
I would really love to see a billionaire tackle this. There's loads of empty, or nearly empty, space in this country. Heck, take over a town if you really want! Sink a few million dollars into kickstarting small-scale urbanism.
I'm not usually much of a billionaire-hater, but today's lot for the most part seems to be uninspired, when it comes to projects like this.
But if you believe 3-4% is normal, then you’re probably waiting for rates to return to “normal.”
I think it’s a side effect of years of low interest rates… people are conditioned now to believe low is normal, and they want to hang on until we get back to that.
I was hoping rates would stay “high” for a while which I thought would soften the housing market so I could buy, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. Instead of prices dropping, inventory just dried up.
Shows how silly I am for thinking I could time the market.
If you think it will stay at 7%, that 3% loan you already have is a treasure to keep using for a decade or two.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/14/us-housing-markets-falling-p...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44907838
The pressure on buyers, at least in the past couple of decades, is that the increase in the supply of housing has not been at all commensurate with the increase in population. That, combined with a great increase in the money supply, makes for tremendous upward pressure on real estate prices.
Sellers generally aren't in a rush except in times of economic crises, especially paired with a period of overleveraging running up to it; i.e. the GFC. Economic softening appears to be in the works at the moment, so buyers should get a little reprieve soon, but since there isn't the same overleveraged buyers all rushing for the exits like in 2008, a similar crash is unlikely.
https://eyeonhousing.org/2020/01/a-decade-of-home-building-t...
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-the-land-stupid-how-t...
So, while interest rates are at historical 'norms', affordability is not.
Its a disgrace that people deny the supply crunch we are in
As it is, NIMBYism is likely the biggest driver of rising costs of living, rising homelessness, rising municipal debt, and generational class divides.
So many people are using AI during the interviews to cheat, as long as you don't use AI and are good at leetcode, probably not that hard to snag an offer. I also interview people at a FAANG, and #1 reason to reject people these days is AI use. If you don't use AI and can leetcode and system design, you're pretty solid and will stand out from other half-baked candidates.
Anecdotally, I know a few engineers with 10+ YOE in NYC, Seattle, and California, all with actual FAANG or FAANG adjacent work experience, who couldn’t find jobs. One of whom even took a minimum wage job, and another who nearly did the same as well.
Maybe the tax code change is kicking off an industry revival?
If tier3 companies are paying $540k-$1.5m for staff in 2025, then I assume the market is turned around.
Can you elaborate? People don’t do well in the interview and say they could do it if they had AI with them? Or…?
Edit: Sorry, I missed “using AI during the interviews to cheat”.
After a few months on the job, he hadn't done any meaningful work. His responses to support tickets were clearly written by an LLM and offered only the most generic (and therefore unhelpful) support. He was eventually let go, and deservedly so.
I think this is a large reason behind the polarization in America today. We aren't all facing the same aspect of this imbalance.
I was hoping that the work-from-home movement was going to help with this, but RTO seems to be in full swing. So, I think our best bet would be to stop incentivizing the concentration of job creation. Absent a fix, we will have to wait a few decades for the imbalance to even out.
Maybe the more fundamental problem is that in big city America, it's easy for existing homeowners to band together to forbid any further housing stock from being built.
See Silicon Valley: amazing concentration of high-paying jobs, laughably low population density.
Could pay people well but half as much and have nice office in Colorado mountains, Vermont, or somewhere else beautiful…
Of course, startups rarely seem interested in saving money…
We should be living in a time of ease, where the whole planet is sustained with all of us only working a few hours a week. Instead most people are fighting for scraps barely able to afford rent.
It won't continue like this forever. The line doesn't always go up.
But instead we have a tiny minority of people who control more and more capital. This has well-known and terrible consequences for society from almost every angle. What I don't understand is why the .1% don't want to step aside and let someone else have a turn. It's funny that our bodies have stomachs, so we know when we've eaten "enough". But money doesn't get stored in the body.
> It's funny that our bodies have stomachs, so we know when we've eaten "enough".
Humorously on topic, GLP-1s patch the reward center in your brain and say “enough is enough.” If only there was a similar protocol for wealth and power.
Otherwise, it's one asset holder selling to another asset holder, usually at ever increasing prices. So yes, a lot of money is simply sitting in the stock market.
Now, some does come back in the form of share buybacks and dividends. That being said, the average dividend yield is significantly less than the long-run average (it's less than 2 percent right now).
The unenployment rate is quite low. There are complaints you can make about the economy but the model of money you laid out is completely wrong.
>All the money has been hoovered into the stock market.
I think you might misunderstand what the stock market is. Or perhaps you misunderstand what what stocks are? When you purchase stock, it doesn't get locked in a vault, with your name written next to it, and the number of shares it got you on that day. That money goes to the company, and they use that to finance their operations (and ideally, further growth). That financing may go directly to salaries, or even if it goes to services, those services are paid to someone who pays salaries.
If your claim is instead that "all" of that money, or some meaningful majority of that money, is going to electricity and AI silicon, I would invite you to do some basic math on the companies involved.
I incorrectly explained what I meant, and broadly speaking, what I wrote is incorrect.
However, I stand by my statement that "all" of the money is not going to electricity or AI silicon.
When you purchase stock, your money goes to the seller of that stock. That's what makes a "market". The stock market isn't a bunch of companies selling their stock to the public.
As far jobs are concerned the job market is completely fucked up. Their is oversupply and there are no wage increase.
It does not take a genius to understand why there is no mobility.
instead of what it should be: safety for your family.
No comments yet
I expect in the not to distant future, the only way someone will get to own a house is to inherent one.
Only if the current insanity around zoning and regulation persists. In many real estate markets, it's literally illegal to increase the supply of housing; in others, price controls make it unappealing to invest in increasing the supply of housing.
I don't know what kind of toxicity is unique to the Anglophone world that exacerbates this problem, but at some point we just need to rip off the band-aid, tell existing homeowners to cry more, and just build, build, build. There's no inherent reason why the price of houses should so far exceed income in this vast country.
Literally anywhere in the "bottom" 99% of the country by real estate costs?
1. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS
[0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
Improving mobility means that you have to make a single earner household a viable pathway again. That means bring house prices down and subsidizing childcare.
Which would cost a bunch of billionaires a couple of pennies. So it will never happen.